Factors comprising adolescents’ readiness for sexual behaviors : a latent profile analysis

textThe current study used multi-wave data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to examine the existence of typologies of readiness for sexual intercourse and contraception among a nationally representative sample of adolescents aged 15-18. Grounded in the theory of planned behavior, the current study used latent profile analyses to establish five profiles of sexual readiness based on adolescents' attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control for sexual intercourse and contraception. Analyses were conducted cross-sectionally and longitudinally, and five classes were confirmed at each of two waves. The current study established and characterized four profiles of readiness for sexual behavior at both waves: “impulsive adolescents,” “precarious adolescents,” “well-controlled adolescents,” and “conservatively-reared adolescents.” Two separate fifth profiles also emerged: “hasty adolescents” at wave 1, and “unrestrained adolescents” at wave 2. Logistic regression of longitudinal data indicated that compared to “impulsive adolescents” at wave 1, “precarious” and “conservatively-reared” adolescents were significantly less likely to engage in sexual intercourse at wave 2, and “well-controlled” adolescents were significantly less likely to engage in casual sex. Wave 1 cross-sectional data indicated that “precarious” adolescents were less likely to have used contraception either at their first time or most recent time of sex, and all other profiles were more likely to have employed contraception than “impulsive” adolescents. Wave 2 cross-sectional analyses indicated that two profiles (“precarious” and “conservatively-reared”) were less likely to engage in sexual intercourse, and two profiles (“well-controlled” and “unrestrained”) were more likely to engage in sexual intercourse than “impulsive” adolescents.Human Development and Family Science

Family socialization of sexuality : parents' awareness of physical sexuality development during early childhood and adolescence

Despite other assumptions, sexuality is a multifaceted concept important to many aspects of one’s being that develops as early as infancy. Socially, however, sexuality is not an acknowledge part of early childhood, rather something that emerges as part of puberty, during adolescence. Parents’ ability to recognize physical sexuality development milestones and interpret their meaning and place within development is crucial to promoting positive, healthy sexuality development. In this dissertation, I propose a theoretical framework for children’s sexuality development, and family socialization of sexuality, from birth to adulthood. Empirically, I examine parents’ observations and responses to physical milestones related to sexuality development during early childhood and during adolescence. Two studies juxtapose the periods of early childhood, ages 1-4 years old, and adolescence, ages 12 – 15, to examine parents’ observations, and aspects of parent-child communication at two distinct periods. In the first study, I interviewed 20 parents of young children, and found four themes that summarized parents’ awareness of sexuality development: 1) Parents rely on their own experiences to form interpretations of their child’s behaviors, 2) Parents observed, but are uncertain about sexuality development in early childhood, 3) Communication between parents about sexuality is limited or implied, and 4) Sexuality does not yet apply to their child. In the second study, I quantitatively examine whether mothers’ observations of children’s pubertal development and puberty knowledge are associated with their inclination for and initiation of puberty-related communication. Analyses of 133 mother-reports, showed mixed significant and non-significant findings. Together, these studies showcase parents’ observations of sexuality and physical development, the need for parents and researchers to reconsider the age of occurrence for sexuality and pubertal milestones, and provide empirical support to the proposed theoretical framework for children’s sexuality development within the family.Human Development and Family Science

Hardware-based smart camera for recovering high dynamic range video from multiple exposures

International audienceIn many applications such as video surveillance or defect detection, the perception of information related to a scene is limited in areas with strong contrasts. The high dynamic range (HDR) capture technique can deal with these limitations. The proposed method has the advantage of automatically selecting multiple exposure times to make outputs more visible than fixed exposure ones. A real-time hardware implementation of the HDR technique that shows more details both in dark and bright areas of a scene is an important line of research. For this purpose, we built a dedicated smart camera that performs both capturing and HDR video processing from three exposures. What is new in our work is shown through the following points: HDR video capture through multiple exposure control, HDR memory management, HDR frame generation, and rep- resentation under a hardware context. Our camera achieves a real-time HDR video output at 60 fps at 1.3 mega- pixels and demonstrates the efficiency of our technique through an experimental result. Applications of this HDR smart camera include the movie industry, the mass-consumer market, military, automotive industry, and sur- veillanc

HDR-ARtiSt: A 1280x1024-pixel Adaptive Real-time Smart camera for High Dynamic Range video

International audienceStandard cameras capture only a fraction of the information that is visible to the human visual system. This is specifically true for natural scenes including areas of low and high illumination due to transitions between sunlit and shaded areas. When capturing such a scene, many cameras are unable to store the full Dynamic Range (DR) resulting in low quality video where details are concealed in shadows or washed out by sunlight.The imaging technique that can overcome this problem is called HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging. This paper describes a complete smart camera built around a standard off-the-shelf LDR (Low Dynamic Range) sensor and a Virtex 6 FPGA board. This smart camera called HDR-ARtiSt (High Dynamic Range Adaptive Real-time Smart camera) is able to produce a real-time HDR live video color stream by recording and combining multiple acquisitions of the same scene while varying the exposure time. This technique appears as one of the most appropriate and cheapest solution to enhance the dynamic range of real-life environments. HDR-ARtiSt embeds real-time multiple captures, HDR processing, data display and transfer of a HDR color video for a full sensor resolution (1280 × 1024 pixels) at 60 frames per second. The main contributions of this work are: (1) Multiple Exposure Control (MEC) dedicated to the smart image capture from the sensor with alternating three exposure times that are dynamically evaluated from frame to frame, (2) Multi-streaming Memory Management Unit (MMMU) dedicated to the memory read/write operations of the three parallel video streams

High Dynamic Range Adaptive Real-time Smart Camera: an overview of the HDR-ARTiST project

International audienceStandard cameras capture only a fraction of the information that is visible to the human visual system. This is specifically true for natural scenes including areas of low and high illumination due to transitions between sunlit and shaded areas. When capturing such a scene, many cameras are unable to store the full Dynamic Range (DR) resulting in low quality video where details are concealed in shadows or washed out by sunlight. The imaging technique that can overcome this problem is called HDR (High Dynamic Range) imaging. This paper describes a complete smart camera built around a standard off-the-shelf LDR (Low Dynamic Range) sensor and a Virtex-6 FPGA board. This smart camera called HDR-ARtiSt (High Dynamic Range Adaptive Real-time Smart camera) is able to produce a real-time HDR live video color stream by recording and combining multiple acquisitions of the same scene while varying the exposure time. This technique appears as one of the most appropriate and cheapest solution to enhance the dynamic range of real-life environments. HDR-ARtiSt embeds real-time multiple captures, HDR processing, data display and transfer of a HDR color video for a full sensor resolution (1280 1024 pixels) at 60 frames per second. The main contributions of this work are: (1) Multiple Exposure Control (MEC) dedicated to the smart image capture with alternating three exposure times that are dynamically evaluated from frame to frame, (2) Multi-streaming Memory Management Unit (MMMU) dedicated to the memory read/write operations of the three parallel video streams, corresponding to the different exposure times, (3) HRD creating by combining the video streams using a specific hardware version of the Devebecs technique, and (4) Global Tone Mapping (GTM) of the HDR scene for display on a standard LCD monitor

Use(ful In(form)ation

I cleaned my room early in the spring of 2009, sorted laundry and cleaned off my oft-cluttered desk. In the process I found an old Mead Composition Notebook from a Film and Literature course I took at the College of Southern Idaho. Inside the back cover I discovered a page of useful information. The charts and measurements included: a multiplication table, 12 other tables intended to measure everything from paper, drugs, liquid and time, metric nomenclature and, finally, conversion tables from the metric system into American standard systems of measurement. I tore the back cover from the notebook and tacked the cardboard back cover onto the wall above my desk. I began writing poems with titles from each of the tables. I began with Linear Measure, because I thought I could comfortably write about feet, yards and inches. When I finished, I went back to the top and wrote poem after poem with titles like 12 months = 1 year, and the like. At first, I wanted to tell everything man can measure. The usefulness of these systems abounds. Everything we trade, sell, buy, find or transfer takes on these values to better categorize and measure actual value via monetary markets. I realized early on there was no way I could describe everything that happens in a week, or properly grasp the measure of a furlong. The writing of these poems was elementary at first. I was jumping in all-happy and excited to have a thesis in mind, to have a project worth projecting. The early poems were packed with information and tidbits from my life to help balance the equations. As I pushed forward and wrote these poems I realized there needed to be a foundation of equality, not just among the greater world I tried to encapsulate, but among the poems themselves. I stopped creating new poems, went back and started cutting the first ones (all written in prose/block format) down to nine lines; it seemed somewhere in the middle, a perfect-plus-2) of prose poetry. I stuck to the format until Miscellaneous Measures, where my formlessness took over and organic patterns emerged, often through ruptures of the block and then into bulbous shapes, then thin. I finished the remaining tables with 9-line format. When I reached the Metric System I increased the font size to 14 and lowered the line requirement to 8 lines. I found that though the font was larger and there was 1 fewer line per poem, the measured length was identical to the 9-line, 12-font poems of the previous tables. This cognitive choice asked me to re-examine how we measure our world differently, acts commonly traced to cultural expectations and rule of law. The shift to the metric system forced me to question the previous tables and all they had discovered, about me, my measurements and the literature I swallow. I began to pull apart these warring systems and tried to find reasons why we cannot have one system. This bothered me, asked me about cultural roots in measuring, noting changes through history and really tried to access the current modals that make us measure through these forms. In writing, I found three different voices emerged, one my own, one of voices of authority and another slang voice (see Key for notations). When I hit the conversion tables, metrics and others met, I was thrown into a caldron of numbers and systems, confused to the point that form was obliterated. I could not keep it straight, literally, and allowed the organic flow of lines to ebb my tides. I wanted to bring up the tropes I’d created in the tables, from myriad systems, but found through conversion that something new emerged. When ideologies become permanent, then asked fort transformation to fit the ideologies of fresh cultures, a common hesitance creeps in. I am more comfortable with gallons than liters, with pounds than grams. But once I was knee-deep in the metrics, I became brethren with them and inches and feet of my initial out-spring leapt foreign; I adapted. In the end, I fought to include any piece of me left, to mash a thousand ideas and slips of information I gained in the process. Process. My set plan could not order everything. I planned as I went, and found I often disregarded my own promise to the project. In places, my emotions got the best of me. I was Micah, tying a bowline from across the crevasse. The beginning, the multiplication table, I saved for last, concerned about the form it may take. I chose to write the table so it could be read both up/down and left/right, to show how multiplication muddles the existence of the original numbers, the prime 1-12’s that initiate the table. Mathematics was the basis for this segment, but I wrote about the objects/stories/relationships measured, rather than the process. Or so I thought. In revision, I noticed places where the difference, the equations took precedence over the mass on the scale or the numbers on the stick. The bigger numbers had ‘bigger’ thoughts. I had adolescent dreams of keeping this thesis uniform, but measurement systems began to conflict, to converge, I found myself caught in power hustles, trading decimals for wholes and tracing degrees of my personal circumference. This thesis is full of broken/mashed words. I invented a form of word math to save space (see Key). Th(is the(sis I wanted to build, a free-flowing blob of language tucked into bed, feet wriggling. By the end (which is now the beginning), I found out what I set to discover. This project begins and ends with the number 1. I am a singularity in a world of plurals, trying to find my measure, my table, to discover my width, girth, reach, depth, weight, capacity and miscellany that skirts the edges of who I am. I didn’t find great answers, but this made it possible for me to at least acquiesce to the idea that some distinct measurements of life are possible, even if the graduated cylinder is half a milliliter off. A certain disillusionment of truth arose, and I accepted it. I set out to find my place in this world and I finished at that singularity. I am 1, just one person, one writer, one mind. Billions of people contribute to the execution of these measurements. I reached out and grabbed chunks of the world, local and global, but found my hand empty. I grasped at patriotism, dialog, advice from elders, hen-picked lines from literature and mashed it all together to write these 120 poems. The final poem, which appears first, the Multiplication Table, can be read both vertically and horizontally. Each individual box also carries with it a certain lesson or weight, a distance covered. I wrote it in columns and rows, going across, then down, then down and across, so that I would be forced to write them in ways that could be read in multiple ways. As I wrote, the first boxes I’d tackle were 1x1, 2x2, 3x3 and so on. The physical document was made of pencil, pen and paper, written (and cut from) a mead composition notebook, much like the one that was the catalyst for this thesis. I glued paper on paper in tiny boxes. Each numbered box has the equivalent number of letters. The typeface and arrangement of these poems was explicitly taken from the back cover of that comp book on my wall (see page 1). Hence, some of the structure of the thesis is atypical. The capitalization in the titles is exactly as it fell on the catalyst page. Hence, some of this thesis will not fit the guidelines required. In essence, this is a thesis based on a found table of contents

Spectral Characterization of a Prototype SFA Camera for Joint Visible and NIR Acquisition

International audienceMultispectral acquisition improves machine vision since it permits capturing more information on object surface properties than color imaging. The concept of spectral filter arrays has been developed recently and allows multispectral single shot acquisition with a compact camera design. Due to filter manufacturing difficulties, there was, up to recently, no system available for a large span of spectrum, i.e., visible and Near Infra-Red acquisition. This article presents the achievement of a prototype of camera that captures seven visible and one near infra-red bands on the same sensor chip. A calibration is proposed to characterize the sensor, and images are captured. Data are provided as supplementary material for further analysis and simulations. This opens a new range of applications in security, robotics, automotive and medical fields

Overview of ghost correction for HDR video stream generation

International audienceMost digital cameras use low dynamic range image sensors, these LDR sensors can capture only a limited luminance dynamic range of the scene[1], to about two orders of magnitude (about 256 to 1024 levels). However, the dynamic range of real-world scenes varies over several orders of magnitude (10.000 levels). To overcome this limitation, several methods exist for creating high dynamic range (HDR) image (expensive method uses dedicated HDR image sensor and low-cost solutions using a conventional LDR image sensor). Large number of low-cost solutions applies a temporal exposure bracketing. The HDR image may be constructed with a HDR standard method (an additional step called tone mapping is required to display the HDR image on conventional system), or by fusing LDR images in different exposures time directly, providing HDR-like[2] images which can be handled directly by LDR image monitors. Temporal exposure bracketing solution is used for static scenes but it cannot be applied directly for dynamic scenes or HDR videos since camera or object motion in bracketed exposures creates artifacts called ghost[3], in HDR image. There are a several technics allowing the detection and removing ghost artifacts (Variance based ghost detection, Entropy based ghost detection, Bitmap based ghost detection, Graph-Cuts based ghost detection …) [4], nevertheless most of these methods are expensive in calculating time and they cannot be considered for real-time implementations. The originality and the final goal of our work are to upgrade our current smart camera allowing HDR video stream generation with a sensor full-resolution (1280x1024) at 60 fps [5]. The HDR stream is performed using exposure bracketing techniques (obtained with conventional LDR image sensor) combined with a tone mapping algorithm. In this paper, we propose an overview of the different methods to correct ghost artifacts which are available in the state of art. The selection of algorithms is done concerning our final goal which is real-time hardware implementation of the ghost detection and removing phases.

Nouvelle génération de systèmes de vision temps réel à grande dynamique

Cette thèse s intègre dans le cadre du projet européen EUREKA "High Dynamic Range - Low NoiseCMOS imagers", qui a pour but de développer de nouvelles approches de fabrication de capteursd images CMOS à haute performance. L objectif de la thèse est la conception d un système de visiontemps réel à grande gamme dynamique (HDR). L axe principal sera la reconstruction, en temps réelet à la cadence du capteur (60 images/sec), d une vidéo à grande dynamique sur une architecturede calcul embarquée.La plupart des capteurs actuels produisent une image numérique qui n est pas capable de reproduireles vraies échelles d intensités lumineuses du monde réel. De la même manière, les écrans, impri-mantes et afficheurs courants ne permettent pas la restitution effective d une gamme tonale étendue.L approche envisagée dans cette thèse est la capture multiple d images acquises avec des tempsd exposition différents permettant de palier les limites des dispositifs actuels.Afin de concevoir un système capable de s adapter temporellement aux conditions lumineuses,l étude d algorithmes dédiés à la grande dynamique, tels que les techniques d auto exposition, dereproduction de tons, en passant par la génération de cartes de radiances est réalisée. Le nouveausystème matériel de type "smart caméra" est capable de capturer, générer et restituer du contenu àgrande dynamique dans un contexte de parallélisation et de traitement des flux vidéos en temps réelThis thesis is a part of the EUREKA European project called "High Dynamic Range - Low NoiseCMOS imagers", which developped new approaches to design high performance CMOS sensors.The purpose of this thesis is to design a real-time high dynamic range (HDR) vision system. Themain focus will be the real-time video reconstruction at 60 frames/sec in an embedded architecture.Most of the sensors produce a digital image that is not able to reproduce the real world light inten-sities. Similarly, monitors, printers and current displays do not recover of a wide tonal range. Theapproach proposed in this thesis is multiple acquisitions, taken with different exposure times, to over-come the limitations of the standard devices.To temporally adapt the light conditions, the study of algorithms dedicated to the high dynamic rangetechniques is performed. Our new smart camera system is able to capture, generate and showcontent in a highly parallelizable context for a real time processingDIJON-BU Doc.électronique (212319901) / SudocSudocFranceF